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Viputheshwar Sitaraman is the young founder of Draw Science, a company he hopes will help improve communication for research scientists and science journal editors.

At just 18 years of age, and soon to graduate from University of Arizona this year, Sitaraman is a regular contributor to Huffington Post, and a budding entrepreneur.

He has already launched a set of award-winning businesses, including KorkBoard, which was part of FbStart, and Live, Love, Lab, which offers free resources to student researchers and which he says gets over 10,000 visits every week.

Very much a self-starter, Sitaraman was reading research papers by the time he was in junior high. One of the things that struck him as he read through the literature for class was how poorly many mainstream science journal articles are illustrated.

"I've had an acute hatred for jargon and always worked to explain my ideas as simply as possible," he told me when I reached him by email. "I gravitated towards graphical communication after I was able to explain the viral life cycle of the human t-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 to my 7-year-old sister, using just a few drawings."

Sitaraman's parents came to the U.S. in 1997, just a few months after he was born. "Both are trained engineers, but my mom works as an artist/interior designer and teacher, running her own business while my dad works in IT."

Sitaraman competed heavily in science research competitions and his posters were known for being far from traditional: often using less than 50 words, and the entire poster looked more like an infographic.

One of his posters caught the eye of Winston Vuong, an MD candidate at University of California Irvine Medical School, and a judge at the Intel International Science Fair.

"We chatted about science communication and blogging for three hours," Sitaraman recalled. "The next week--with no formal website or graphic design experience--I launched Draw Science as a blog."

"I had always cultivated graphic design as a hobby, but never expected it to become such a large part of my career."